It is known for a company to advertise or display its products and services on web pages of an internet website. Internet users who visit the company's website may be interested in purchasing or obtaining information about the company's products and services. An internet user's visit to the company's website is anonymous, unless the company takes measures to track a visitor's access to its website. There are contact management systems that are used for lead referrals. The problem with contact management systems is that the rate of contacts to a website is far too rapid for any contact management system that requires manual research prior to referring a contact to or lead to a company representative.
U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2004/0225687A1 involves a system for identifying visitors to a website. This patent publication teaches a system for identifying a visitor to a website by cross-referencing the visitor's network address against a database to determine the organization with which the visitor is associated. However, this publication fails to disclose a system that is capable of referring leads to representatives by product line, and fails to disclose a system to handle high throughput lead generation.
U.S. Pat. Publ. No. 2004/0143473A1 involves a system for assigning a sales lead to a representative. This patent publication teaches a system for assigning insurance leads to an insurance account representative based upon the territory and employer. This publication does not disclose a system capable of referring leads to representatives by product line and it also fails to disclose a system that handles high throughput lead generation.
Various aspects of the system of the invention are described herein using terms related to the internet environment. For instance, “IP address” is an identifier for a computer on a network. “Domain name” is a name that identifies one or more IP addresses. “DNS” is an abbreviation for Domain Name System, which is an internet service that translates a domain name into an IP address. A “reverse DNS” is an internet service that translates an IP address into a domain name. “WHOIS” is an internet service that returns ownership information about a domain name or IP address. WHOIS databases are maintained by the registrars of domain names. “ISP” is an abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, which is a company that provides access to the internet. “URL” is an abbreviation for the Uniform Resource Locator, which is the address of web pages or documents on the internet. When a URL is generated by a search engine, it may contain one or more keywords or phrases entered by a person or machine in the search string of the search engine.